Researcher of the Month: Markus Hamunen

photo: Mika Federley

The Language Bank of Finland is a service for researchers using language resources. Markus Hamunen, a doctoral student at the University of Helsinki, describes his research on several of the dialect corpora deposited in the Language Bank.

Who are you?

I am Markus Hamunen, and I am a doctoral student in the language research program of Finnish language. My doctoral research concerns infinite verb structures about the means and medium of action in dialect speech (e.g. ”männä koekkelehtii”, ”tuloo juoste”, ”tekköö salvaamala”).

What is your research topic?

My research is connected to the language representation model called constructive grammar. I am, on the other hand, figuring out how the concepts of means and medium manifest themselves in the semantics of the said infinite structures, what means and medium are in the first place, and also how these structures have been used in Finnish dialects.

How is your research related to the Language Bank?

Among the Language Bank’s dialect corpora, especially the Digital Morphology Archive (dma), the Finnish Dialect Syntax Archive (LA-murre-korp) and Samples of Spoken Finnish (SKN-korp) have been very useful because of their features enabling precise queries. The infinite structures I study are not frequent in dialect speech, which is why corpus tools have been an effective aid in acquiring material.

The FIN-CLARIN consortium consists of a group of Finnish universities along with CSC – IT Center for Science and the Institute for the Languages of Finland (Kotus). FIN-CLARIN helps the researchers in Finland to use, to refine, to preserve and to share their language resources. The Language Bank of Finland is the collection of services that provides the language materials and tools for the research community.